BSc Psychology is accredited by the United Arab Emirates Ministry of Education
The University of Birmingham is home to one of the largest and most active psychology schools in the UK. Ranking among the top 100 in the world for Psychology (QS World Rankings, 2023), we are renowned for the cutting-edge research that improves people's lives on a personal, social, and political level, as well as the knowledge and skills we instill in our graduates.
Psychology plays a significant part in modern day life, including corporate organisations, law enforcement, public healthcare and educational institutions. We offer a Psychology curriculum that covers the breadth of contemporary psychological theory and practice, from child development to psychopharmacology, from social psychology to human neuroscience.
Psychology is traditionally defined as the study of mind and behaviour, but this simple description doesn’t truly capture the tremendous variety of phenomena that you will study or the skills you will learn as a psychologist.
The behaviours that you will study range from simple acts like feeding, to relatively more complex skills such as language and social interactions. In studying the mind, our programme deals with a very wide range of abilities and processes, such as seeing, hearing, feeling and remembering and how these processes act in concert making humans conscious and intelligent.
More recently, psychology has become more integrated with the neurosciences, and our programme mines what we know about how the brain and nervous system underlie our thoughts and behaviours, for example, by determining which brain areas and networks deal with particular mental functions, and how individual nerve cells work and communicate with each other.
The degree programme is structured on a modular basis. In the first and second years, you will take a range of modules covering psychology, research methods and subject-related skills. In your final year, you will be offered a range of specialist modules bringing you to the forefront of the field in some carefully selected areas of psychology.
Years 1 – 3
Our Psychology degree is structured so that you follow a common programme in all of the areas that make up the core of contemporary psychology. In addition, in the third year you are offered a range of specialist modules which will allow you to focus on the forefront of the discipline in some selected areas.
First and second years
In your first two years you will study the core theories and methods of psychology, covering child development, learning, cognitive psychology, perception, personality, social psychology, and brain and behaviour. You will also learn how to design experiments and collect and analyse data.
Third year
Year 3 is designed to allow in-depth coverage of a more limited range of topics. You will also engage in the research process in a more extensive and in-depth manner, which may include an independent Research Project.